I had a really interesting conversation with a friend of mine yesterday about what “women’s spaces” mean for transfeminine people. Fae were explaining to me about faer recent involvement in faer work’s women’s employee resource group, and how fae felt conflicted because while fae are transfeminine and often present as quite traditionally feminine, fae truly do not embrace the term “woman” when self-describing. However, it’s a lot easier for fem to say to cis people “nonbinary trans woman” because it gets the point across as to how fae expect to be interacted with. We talked about the intention of the ERG in the first place, and I argued that ultimately a women’s ERG exists to address gender gaps in leadership and opportunity, so faer presence as a person with an underrepresented gender would seem to be desirable from a position of solidarity. Fae raised that the tenor of the group often leaned more individualistic, ie. more “girlboss” than feminist, and additionally that fae were nervous about speaking up for fear of being viewed as an interloper by TERFs or TERF-inclined members. The conversation left me wondering how effective ERG-pushed policies like gender ratio quotas for leadership could actually be if the sexist policies that led to board rooms filling up with white cis men are never dismantled.
When I was first coming to terms with my need to transition, I hoped that I would find more solidarity with cis women. Having been a good little feminist scholar in college and after, I guess my dream was that through my words and actions it would be apparent that I knew how to shirk my previously-afforded male privilege and find connection with other women through our common struggles. I think I also hoped some cis women would take pity on me and help me learn the lessons of girlhood that I wasn’t afforded before. Instead, I’ve found myself caught in this feedback loop. When I’m in women’s spaces, femme spaces, I don’t know who I can trust because you can’t spot the TERFs. All it takes is one dirty look from someone and suddenly I feel afraid for my safety. It’s like a kid peed in the pool, the water is tainted. And then I don’t want to be in that space. I go to another event for femmes and wonder, “where are the other transfems?” and I get looks again and I’m out. It’s a politics of hatred and exclusion, and it seems to be working. I don’t get the impression that most cis women (or nonbinary AFABs and transmascs) are even aware that these are the waters they’re swimming in.
One-on-one, I have a lot of insecurities about doing womanhood “right”, and so I can sometimes be closed off with cis friends and acquaintances. It’s really rare that anyone sees how I’m at a disadvantage and makes me feel welcome. I have a couple of cis friends who are phenomenal at this and I’m very thankful to know them, but they’re definitely the exception. What seems to be the common thread with these women is they’ve had to grapple with gender more than the average person, maybe through their work or with a trans or non-gender-conforming partner. I feel like most people take their relationship with gender for granted, and that everyone - cis and trans - stands to gain from some deliberation with themselves about their whereabouts in the gender landscape. For example, this past year my wife had an epiphany about her own cis gender performance, and has absolutely blossomed in her embrace of dykeness since. She cleaned out her closet and dumped out all of her skirts and dresses once she realized - and this will be familiar to most trans readers - she wanted to be with women who dressed femme, not be one of them. It’s been kind of amazing to watch, and it’s instilled in me a dream of a future where cis and trans people alike are empowered to find their own gender euphoria. I think in a world like that I could find the sisterhood I want so badly.
I’ve been rereading Imogen Binnie’s first book Nevada over the past couple of weeks, and it continues to surprise me how much my second pass through differs from my first. I read Nevada about a month before I came out to myself as trans, and I credit it for showing me what an egg I was and how I was repressing my need to transition. On this second pass it’s been really startling to me how much my opinion of the protagonist Maria Griffiths has changed. Last year she struck me as a somewhat messy, somewhat tragic figure - I think I was carrying a lot more of the “sad pathetic transsexual” stereotype in my brain at the time, and Maria fostered some pathos along those lines. This time though, I’m just like “girl, take your shot.” Maria is irresponsible, hurtful to the people in her life, rationalizes as many bad decisions as she can, and intellectualizes anything that tries to poke at her true feelings. She’s proud and won’t ask others for help, and part of that is because she’s been hurt before but another part of that is she’s just not willing to sit with her feelings. Binnie has created a really interesting character that subverts the transnormative narrative: Maria Griffiths has not grown substantially as a person from her transition.
I’m bringing up Maria and Nevada in the context of women’s spaces because at one point early in the book she functions as a mouthpiece for Binnie by writing an interesting blogpost about trans women stereotypes. To quote some:
There is a stereotype that trans women get all this male privilege all their lives, and then they transition and take up too much space and are overly assertive and, y’know, stuff like that. And it’s true, sometimes folks transition and are jerks; the flip side is that there are a lot of cis women who are jerks, too, and those trans women just join the general population of women who are jerks.
What’s a lot more common, a million times more common, and what nobody ever seems to talk about, is this thing where trans women are given male privilege all their lives before transition but they don’t know what to do with it so it kind of stunts them socially.
…
I don’t think I’ve ever met a trans woman in the process of transition who was comfortable taking up, like, any goddam space at all, you know? You have to actively look at the women around you, if you’re lucky enough to be close to any women, to figure out that women take up tons of space, however much they want, all the time—they just tend to do it differently than men.
I don’t think what Binnie-by-way-of-Maria is gesturing at here in terms of how to occupy space has clicked for me yet. I know what she’s talking about, I’ve seen it before, and I’m just not there yet. My mantra this week has been “this is where I am right now.” Transition is slow, personal growth is slow, and I’m often impatient to get to the part where I feel like I can take up space, where I feel more comfortable being myself around cis women, where I can go further and assert myself in feminist solidarity. I’m not Maria Griffiths because I am willing to reflect on my feelings and try to change my behavior, but it’s a struggle to keep moving forward when it can feel unsafe to be present and active in the sort of spaces that ostensibly should be helping me towards that growth.